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[Roleplaying Games] Thank God I Finally Have A Table For Cannabis Potency.

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Dungeon World is fundamentally at odds with initiative-based combat (and that would be true for any PbtA hack) because monsters don't "act" per say; they just ask questions of players:

"The giant is charging you, Hans -- what do you do?"
"The giant has just batted Hans aside, Geld -- what do you do?"

etc. You could mechanize the players' initiative, but I prefer the flexibility of having one "round" be A-B-C, the next one be B-C-A, the next one be A-B-A-C, etc. It is an area where DW/PbtA fundamentally clashes with D&D scale, but it's manageable.

I think the one thing in DW that is missing that I kinda feel it needs is some sort of initiative during combat. Combat fighting in a group, imo, needs mechanical ways to keep track of who has done what. When I played with TheRoadVirus in his DW game, I always worry that I'm either going to try to do something before everyone else does, which causes me not to do anything at all until the GM says "Hey, you're the last this round. Go." Added with the mechanic that DW has apparently where if the players don't make a move after a bit of time the monster does, makes Combat seem chaotic and not as fun as it should be.

I disagree, but I will agree that if you have a large group size it can be chaotic playing PbtA games in "combat."

In Dungeon World, the GM isn't supposed to say "you're the last one this round, what do you do?"

One of the things I love about Dungeon World is how cohesive a "round" of combat can feel without needing initiative. This goes for any PbtA game that uses combat, but using dungeon world as an example.

You're not meant to be going around the table 1 by 1 asking PCs what they do. You're meant to be using the outcome of each move to change the fictional positioning of the fight. If the Fighter runs up and smashes the Ogre with his hammer, maybe you ask the Thief what they do as a follow up before moving to the next person. If the Fighter misses his attack and the Ogre smashes him against the wall, maybe you ask the Cleric how they react because it gives them a chance to either defend, attack the ogre, or go heal their ally. Stuff like that.

Plus a lot of times a player turn isn't even them acting as the initiator. You might make a soft move against a player who hasn't "acted" that turn and then what they do in reaction to it becomes their turn.

It requires the GM to be paying attention and making sure everybody gets chances to jump in to the fun, but you would lose a ton of what makes PbtA great by using an initiative order, IMO.

I've always done combat in DW as a player as "I am going to speak up when I have something interesting to do - except if I just did a bunch of stuff, because I shouldn't monopolize the scene."

The problem that I have is that I want everyone to be able to do play but at the same time I don't want to step on toes. Trust me, I got interesting things I want to do, I'm a fucking dwarf wildman who fights with his bare hands ripping and tearing at shit while wearing an armor made from kneecaps. But the nice guy in me doesn't want to interrupt or steal the light from others who also have equally interesting things they want to do. Which is why I think initiative is important to have in group combat systems.

I can't speak for TRV, but if/when people get pushy I just say "sure we can cover, that but first I wanna hear from...".

I don't think baking an initiative system in to the game would solve this, but it's absolutely something I can imagine some groups do.

Not all problems need a system to be created, and I think you'd lose something by stapling more of D&D on to Dungeon World.

I've always done combat in DW as a player as "I am going to speak up when I have something interesting to do - except if I just did a bunch of stuff, because I shouldn't monopolize the scene."

Which works great if everyone is equally gregarious. Or when there are enough cool things to go around.

High intensity situations like combat can be tough for less outgoing members of the group to get input into, I've found. At least without some sort of cyclical check in system.

Yeah, when some players are just more outgoing than others, some of it's on the GM to try and get equal participation going. That can be looked at as a plus or a minus.

Disagree. It's on everyone at the table to try and make sure that focus is roughly equal. Feels against the point of a PbtA game to say it is ultimately on the GM to do that. There are circumstances where this would be true, Con games spring to mind, but for a group to really work they're going to need to be working with and playing off each other.

I think part of the issue for me, personally, might be that my entire exposure to DW so far has been online. In that medium, I try to be very cognizant of others and their attempts to be heard, because I know I have a tendency to dominate a space if I don't check myself. Which means I'm usually a wallflower until I finally decide I need to step up. Or I make sure to get my stuff in early (like charging into every room first) so that my reluctance to chime in won't hurt the flow later.

I'm running Dungeon World now, and interestingly enough, I feel like it's improved my ability to run D&D 5E combats (using 5e rules of rounds/actions and such, but making it much more important to describe fictionally what those actions are, and snow balling any misses into the successes of the enemies they're facing).

I think this is an excellent observation. One of the things I've noticed from digging into OSR games is that classic D&D encounters were fiction-first and improvisational, but none of that was represented in the mechanics. So most modern D&D players were never exposed to it. The increasingly elaborate combat mechanics of 3E/4E/Pathfinder almost feel like a patch over being unwilling or unable to write a decent DM's guide.

By codifying those elements Dungeon World teaches you how to play classic D&D, just with different mechanics.

It's interesting you mention the comparison between Dungeon World and classic D&D/OSR. I've been going back and forth internally on whether DW is closer to OSR than D&D, or on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. I'm pretty sure classic adherents hate PbtA?

A while back I was looking into OSR and reading various articles and blogs about what OSR meant, what it was doing that was "right" compared to other mainstream games at the time, that sort of stuff. There seemed to be a massive push against the rise of the improvisational, fiction-based game, that the game was meaningless without a fully GM-defined world and strict rules. OSR doesn't have as many video game-like moves like Triple Whirlwind Backslash and does seem to want players to narrate what they do, but at the same time the movement seems simulationist.

A big argument was about the concept of the quantum ogre - if you have two paths and place an ogre on the left and a carefree trail on the right, and players go right, they don't still encounter the ogre you planned for them to fight. Because that's railroading, and your game is no longer a simulation of a real place that exists in your mind, but has totally fallen apart whether your players know it or not. Your players should've had an easy, boring walk, and next time it's your responsibility to plan for more challenges.

DW is the antithesis of that: even if you didn't plan on an ogre, something interesting and challenging happens because the rules demand it. Someone failed a roll so maybe there's a monster now that wouldn't have been there before - unwelcome truth, use up their resources, etc.

DW says things like "hey wizard, when you draw on a place of power to create a magical effect, tell the GM what you want to do." I get the impression OSR would include a percentile roll to see if a place of power is present in this hex, and another roll on a table to see what kind of place of power it is and what effects are possible, followed by rolls for the GM to see what the cost of the ritual will be.

There are some really nasty OSR people out there that just drove me further toward hype for games like DW. I read a protracted argument about how if a player wants to find a certain kind of book in a library, the GM ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT materialize it for them just "because it would be cool" and further the story, it would have have to MAKE EXPLICIT SENSE or be previously placed there by the GM. Otherwise you're not playing an RPG anymore.

I'm running Dungeon World now, and interestingly enough, I feel like it's improved my ability to run D&D 5E combats (using 5e rules of rounds/actions and such, but making it much more important to describe fictionally what those actions are, and snow balling any misses into the successes of the enemies they're facing).

I think this is an excellent observation. One of the things I've noticed from digging into OSR games is that classic D&D encounters were fiction-first and improvisational, but none of that was represented in the mechanics. So most modern D&D players were never exposed to it. The increasingly elaborate combat mechanics of 3E/4E/Pathfinder almost feel like a patch over being unwilling or unable to write a decent DM's guide.

By codifying those elements Dungeon World teaches you how to play classic D&D, just with different mechanics.

It's interesting you mention the comparison between Dungeon World and classic D&D/OSR. I've been going back and forth internally on whether DW is closer to OSR than D&D, or on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. I'm pretty sure classic adherents hate PbtA?

A while back I was looking into OSR and reading various articles and blogs about what OSR meant, what it was doing that was "right" compared to other mainstream games at the time, that sort of stuff. There seemed to be a massive push against the rise of the improvisational, fiction-based game, that the game was meaningless without a fully GM-defined world and strict rules. OSR doesn't have as many video game-like moves like Triple Whirlwind Backslash and does seem to want players to narrate what they do, but at the same time the movement seems simulationist.

A big argument was about the concept of the quantum ogre - if you have two paths and place an ogre on the left and a carefree trail on the right, and players go right, they don't still encounter the ogre you planned for them to fight. Because that's railroading, and your game is no longer a simulation of a real place that exists in your mind, but has totally fallen apart whether your players know it or not. Your players should've had an easy, boring walk, and next time it's your responsibility to plan for more challenges.

DW is the antithesis of that: even if you didn't plan on an ogre, something interesting and challenging happens because the rules demand it. Someone failed a roll so maybe there's a monster now that wouldn't have been there before - unwelcome truth, use up their resources, etc.

DW says things like "hey wizard, when you draw on a place of power to create a magical effect, tell the GM what you want to do." I get the impression OSR would include a percentile roll to see if a place of power is present in this hex, and another roll on a table to see what kind of place of power it is and what effects are possible, followed by rolls for the GM to see what the cost of the ritual will be.

There are some really nasty OSR people out there that just drove me further toward hype for games like DW. I read a protracted argument about how if a player wants to find a certain kind of book in a library, the GM ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT materialize it for them just "because it would be cool" and further the story, it would have have to MAKE EXPLICIT SENSE or be previously placed there by the GM. Otherwise you're not playing an RPG anymore.

This kind of thinking leads to two things:

1) Extreme rail-roading because the players aren't allowed to think of any solution to the problem other than what the GM has already decided upon.

2) A situation where the players come up with a solution that bypasses a bunch of prepwork that the GM did, so that they either flip the table over in a rage or collapse to the floor sobbing because you knocked the mind-controlled giant over on the building where the evil wizard was hiding and squashed him, he was behind the whole thing it was supposed to take you hours to track him down but now he's dead and so the whole session is over.

Hey, Shadowrun group can't happen this week so might pile together a quick Infinity oneshot to run over Discord. Will likely do pre-built characters but can accept non pre-builts if you want (bear in mind the online builder is broke as shit). Will be taking place sunday 6PM GMT (UK time). PM me if you have any interest or whatever.

Unsurprisingly, the designer of Dungeon World has thoughts on OSR that hew closer to what I was saying above. In particular the idea that OSR means strict rules seems anathematic to every OSR ruleset I've read, which straight-up do not have enough rules to adhere strictly to. The common term I've heard is "rulings, not rules" -- if your system has rules for bull rushing an opponent you'll be obligated to use those every time an action of that sort comes up, which not only means looking up obscure rules in the book but adhering to mechanics that may not make sense in the specific situation you're using them. But if your system doesn't have those rules and your player says "I want to rush the orc and shove him off the cliff" you can invent the mechanics that make sense in that moment.

The quantum ogre is an argument I've seen come up before, though I don't think it was contextualized around OSR. My understanding is that there are two distinct approaches to OSR:

(1) You play modules, and if you're playing a module, you're gonna play the module. Your players may come up with all kinds of creative solutions to the problems presented by the module, but they're not just gonna walk away from the module. In approach (1) there's no quantum ogre because there aren't two paths to begin with, there's just the one that leads to the module.

(2) Pure sandbox. In this situation the quantum ogre is irrelevant because there's no such thing as a carefree trail. If you've built two (or many more) distinct paths, every single one of them has an encounter generated for it -- or at the least a random encounter table related to that type of terrain, level of danger, time of day, etc. From your prep you can then improvise out details -- i.e. your table may just say "traveling merchant", but depending on context a traveling merchant may bring rumors, provide replacement gear/supplies, or even be a combat threat.

That book argument in particular sounds like a nightmare. I don't have an argument against that kind of GM other than "don't play in that game" because it does not sound fun.

Yeah, I won't claim the impression I got was an accurate one of what OSR is all about, but what I was reading soured me.

The other thing I saw was discussion surrounding the rise of the negadungeon in the OSR world, i.e. James Raggi's work like Death Frost Doom and imitators, bent around screwing over players and giving them nothing in return if they take the bait. This is a place that exists in the fiction, but the winning move is not to play. Didn't sound like a good time to me.

I say that even though I have a devious curiosity in someday trying to run the original Gygax Tomb of Horrors, just for the sake of appreciating what things used to be like and how far we've come.

Interesting that you mention Steven Lumpkin, he ran one of the DW games I was watching! And seemed awesome at it! I'll have to check out that Hack Attack.

I actually kind of like the idea of the dramatic irony of a negadungeon, but you'd better be running it for a group of players that knows what's going on -- if not specifically about the dungeon, at least about the overall theme of the game. Even if it was presented from the beginning as "don't ever go there", the idea of springing the narrative reveal at the end and being like "haha you idiots fucked everything up" seems like a good way to break up with a group of players.

Be warned -- watching Hack Attack may lead to watching RollPlay's West Marches, which is Steven Lumpkin running an extremely OSR D&D5E sandbox. It's also like 300 hours of content.

The use of completely inflexible rules adherence as an originalist argument in tabletop RPGs had always been kinda mind blowing to me.

I think it owes to the fact that the people making those arguments either played those games as green enough kids to not really understand or remember them at all, or simply didn't play them until recently and are attempting to reconstruct the experience they never got, like some sort of roleplaying archeologist that only understands half the pictograms.

I think the main point of friction between OSR gaming and Dungeon World would be that the latter strips the GM of most of their authority and forces them to follow actual rules.

Regarding megadungeons, I don't think Death Frost Doom really is one ? I'm thinking more of Stonehell, Barrowmaze, Anomalous Subterranean Environment. All three of these aren't adversarial, not in the gotcha! way the Tomb of Horrors was in any way. Old-school gaming might seem adversarial due to the presence of imbalanced encounters, but that's because fleeing and negotiating are valid strategies, because the point is not to kill all the monsters, it's to loot the dungeon !

I think the main point of friction between OSR gaming and Dungeon World would be that the latter strips the GM of most of their authority and forces them to follow actual rules.

Regarding megadungeons, I don't think Death Frost Doom really is one ? I'm thinking more of Stonehell, Barrowmaze, Anomalous Subterranean Environment. All three of these aren't adversarial, not in the gotcha! way the Tomb of Horrors was in any way. Old-school gaming might seem adversarial due to the presence of imbalanced encounters, but that's because fleeing and negotiating are valid strategies, because the point is not to kill all the monsters, it's to loot the dungeon !

I think the main point of friction between OSR gaming and Dungeon World would be that the latter strips the GM of most of their authority and forces them to follow actual rules.

Regarding megadungeons, I don't think Death Frost Doom really is one ? I'm thinking more of Stonehell, Barrowmaze, Anomalous Subterranean Environment. All three of these aren't adversarial, not in the gotcha! way the Tomb of Horrors was in any way. Old-school gaming might seem adversarial due to the presence of imbalanced encounters, but that's because fleeing and negotiating are valid strategies, because the point is not to kill all the monsters, it's to loot the dungeon !

Ohhh I read too fast ! It's the first time I hear about negadungeons. Considering how much I like Apocalypse World, where your life just gets continuously shittier and more difficult for no apparent benefit, I don't think I'm against the principle. But I don't think applying it to a dungeon with a old-school DnD ruleset would be conductive to fun in my case.

There are some really nasty OSR people out there that just drove me further toward hype for games like DW. I read a protracted argument about how if a player wants to find a certain kind of book in a library, the GM ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT materialize it for them just "because it would be cool" and further the story, it would have have to MAKE EXPLICIT SENSE or be previously placed there by the GM. Otherwise you're not playing an RPG anymore.

I... yes?

I mean, like, let's say we were playing Dungeon World, and we're in the middle of this campaign about an elven power struggle for the throne of Wundagore. If you were in some library and you wanted to find the two-thousand-year old elven genealogy that offers definitive proof of the true heir to the throne of Wundagore, I wouldn't just say "yep, it's under W". I'd consider the circumstances.

Human capital library? Probably not, but you could find a book about the ancient place where those records sleep to this day.

Provisional Elven capital library (stag faction)? Still probably not but you'd get a decent map and some travelogues or something.

And in every case you'd probably be rolling to find something useful or valuable, with boar faction infiltrators/planted misinformation/the head librarian's librarian head waiting in the wings if you honked it.

The specific example wasn't about a key campaign object, as if players are searching for the lost Orb of Grach-ma and one of the players is like "I find it under this nearby rock" and the GM is like "ok we'll roll with that."

It was a player just wanting a book on botany to do something interesting in the next couple minutes.

I mean Dungeon World seems largely based on that kind of rabbit-from-a-hat fun, within reason. The Adventuring Gear is designed for you to be able to pull whatever mundane object you happen to need at the time. There's not a GM-approved list of what's in there. Sure they can veto but I think that kind of handwavey tool is great, keep things moving, let the creativity work.

2) A situation where the players come up with a solution that bypasses a bunch of prepwork that the GM did, so that they either flip the table over in a rage or collapse to the floor sobbing because you knocked the mind-controlled giant over on the building where the evil wizard was hiding and squashed him, he was behind the whole thing it was supposed to take you hours to track him down but now he's dead and so the whole session is over.

My group does this all the time. If you don't want your main villain to die a quick and ignoble death, he needs to stay at the other side of the campaign from the players the entire time. Otherwise, someone's going to get two natural 20s with a vorpal axe, or have 5 dice on a mind control spells constantly explode to get 47 successes, or someone's going to get the bright idea to telepathically say hello the super slime monster which drives it nuts and has it devour the entire pirate force that was holding the party captive, or any of a dozen other things we've pulled off.

The book question is a lot more about simulationist vs narrativist vs gamist styles than OSR vs modern.

Simulationist: does it make sense for the book to be there? It's there. If not, it's not. If there's some way for the players to figure out where they could find the book, it's up to them to figure it out.

Narratavist: if it's interesting, the book is there or at least something or someone is there that can point them towards the book, possibly with other challenges in the way.

Gamist: ROLL DEM BONES.

Most approaches will end up being a hybrid of the two. @Glazius your approach sounds like a simulationist/gamist hybrid. Strict simulationist, as described above, sounds like a nightmare.

The specific example wasn't about a key campaign object, as if players are searching for the lost Orb of Grach-ma and one of the players is like "I find it under this nearby rock" and the GM is like "ok we'll roll with that."

It was a player just wanting a book on botany to do something interesting in the next couple minutes.

I mean Dungeon World seems largely based on that kind of rabbit-from-a-hat fun, within reason. The Adventuring Gear is designed for you to be able to pull whatever mundane object you happen to need at the time. There's not a GM-approved list of what's in there. Sure they can veto but I think that kind of handwavey tool is great, keep things moving, let the creativity work.

2) A situation where the players come up with a solution that bypasses a bunch of prepwork that the GM did, so that they either flip the table over in a rage or collapse to the floor sobbing because you knocked the mind-controlled giant over on the building where the evil wizard was hiding and squashed him, he was behind the whole thing it was supposed to take you hours to track him down but now he's dead and so the whole session is over.

My group does this all the time. If you don't want your main villain to die a quick and ignoble death, he needs to stay at the other side of the campaign from the players the entire time. Otherwise, someone's going to get two natural 20s with a vorpal axe, or have 5 dice on a mind control spells constantly explode to get 47 successes, or someone's going to get the bright idea to telepathically say hello the super slime monster which drives it nuts and has it devour the entire pirate force that was holding the party captive, or any of a dozen other things we've pulled off.

Seriously, no campaign survives first contact with players.

No campaign exists before contact with the players. Play is what happens at the table. When I switched to this mode of thinking, it made my prepping much easier and I felt way less pressure as a GM.

The specific example wasn't about a key campaign object, as if players are searching for the lost Orb of Grach-ma and one of the players is like "I find it under this nearby rock" and the GM is like "ok we'll roll with that."

It was a player just wanting a book on botany to do something interesting in the next couple minutes.

I mean Dungeon World seems largely based on that kind of rabbit-from-a-hat fun, within reason. The Adventuring Gear is designed for you to be able to pull whatever mundane object you happen to need at the time. There's not a GM-approved list of what's in there. Sure they can veto but I think that kind of handwavey tool is great, keep things moving, let the creativity work.

2) A situation where the players come up with a solution that bypasses a bunch of prepwork that the GM did, so that they either flip the table over in a rage or collapse to the floor sobbing because you knocked the mind-controlled giant over on the building where the evil wizard was hiding and squashed him, he was behind the whole thing it was supposed to take you hours to track him down but now he's dead and so the whole session is over.

My group does this all the time. If you don't want your main villain to die a quick and ignoble death, he needs to stay at the other side of the campaign from the players the entire time. Otherwise, someone's going to get two natural 20s with a vorpal axe, or have 5 dice on a mind control spells constantly explode to get 47 successes, or someone's going to get the bright idea to telepathically say hello the super slime monster which drives it nuts and has it devour the entire pirate force that was holding the party captive, or any of a dozen other things we've pulled off.

Seriously, no campaign survives first contact with players.

No campaign exists before contact with the players. Play is what happens at the table. When I switched to this mode of thinking, it made my prepping much easier and I felt way more pressure as a GM.

My group does not handle sandbox. If you try to just play what happens at my table, you're fucked because the table won't do anything or go anywhere. I tried, and it was terrible. So very, very terrible. You need to have a campaign and a plan, because otherwise nothing will happen and the players will hate you.

This also isn't an article about OSR. It's an article about actor vs author vs director stance in which the writer doesn't understand that stances other actor exist.

I know, I stumbled across it alongside other posts and articles. The guy is a strong proponent of OSR and most of his writings stem from that viewpoint. IIRC he was hired as a 5e consultant as a prominent OSR dude who could help them get back to basics.

He's insufferable though and his arguments make me want to run in the complete opposite direction of anything he advocates.

I didn't mean to turn discussion that way and funnel any attention to him, just wanted to clarify what it was about when Glazius expanded on it.